Here are some things I learned in the last few days about building characters in Maya that will export to Gamestudio. If you have any other tips/guidelines, feel free to add to this - I wish someone had told me these things before I started
These are in no particular order, just things I ran into while trying to get a character to export which weren't in the manual. Also, this is written for animators and tech artists who are very familiar with Maya and know how to rig, but don't necessarily know Gamestudio's limitations.
My pipeline is Maya 7 -> fbx -> MED, and I'm using bones animation in the game.
1.
Always freeze your meshes before skinning. If you are planning to use bones animation in GS and you have translation or rotation values on your skinned meshes you may get bad deformations once imported into MED.
2.
Build your animation rig to use only one animation method. You can use joints OR you can use blendshapes, but you can't use both on the same character, even if you are planning to convert them all to vertex animation in Gamestudio. If you are using both, only the joint animation will make it into MED.
3.
Your export skeleton should be one continuous joint hierarchy. You cannot use constraints or expressions to move joints and expect this to export. If you have constraints or expressions on your joints, you have to bake the animation onto the joint before export. (This is pretty standard in the game industry btw)
4. Rigs that use direct connections through Maya's node hierarchy will not work at all because you cannot bake them. So no fancy rigging!
